"It's yet another in a long series of diversions in an attempt to avoid responsibility." - Chris Knight
Archive for the ‘Music’ Category
$800 Mini-Guitar Fits In Suitcase
November 27th, 2007 by iDunzo
Want a tiny, bad, $800 guitar? Hammacher Schlemmer delivers.
Named The World’s Smallest Percision Electric Guitar, the thing is 1/6 the size of a standard example and is just over two feet long. It has a full complement of 20 frets.
For a laugh, read the marketing blatherskite:
Its injection-molded high-impact polymer composite body is filled with billions of tiny air bubbles that reproduce the cellular structure of wood, giving the guitar the same resonant properties of hardwoods used in standard-sized guitars without the expansion and contraction associated with wood.
I think he’s saying it’s made of plastic.
Posted in Geekery + Music + Technology + Toys & Gadgets | 
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AT&T Adds Napster For Wireless Customers
October 22nd, 2007 by iDunzo
AT&T said this morning that it will soon make available a music service from Napster, allowing its wireless customers to download more than five million full-track songs on their mobile devices.
AT&T customers will have a choice of downloading five tracks a month for $7.49 with the Napster Mobile Five-Track Pack plan or purchasing songs for $2 each without the plan.
Napster Mobile will come with a feature that sends a music track to a mobile device wirelessly and at the same time makes a duplicate copy available for download to a PC.
AT&T claims it is the only wireless carrier in the United States that will let customers buy full-track songs wirelessly from both Napster, a mainstream nationwide provider of digital music, and eMusic, the largest retailer of independent music.
The carrier was the first to offer the iPhone, which has a built-in iPod for listening to music and watching video. iPhone customers can purchase music from Apple’s iTunes store.
As a comparison, songs on iTunes cost 99 cents each. Apple last week slashed prices on copy-protection-free songs from $1.29 to 99 cents.
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Napster Overhaul Adds Web-Based Music Client
October 16th, 2007 by iDunzo
Napster is re-inventing itself yet again as it attempts to compete with iTunes and others in the online music business.
The new Napster 4.0 sees the company ditching its desktop application in favor of an browser-based client in an effort to expand its market.
That should be good news for Mac and Linux users who have, until 4.0, been locked out of Napster’s Windows-only model.
Napster’s service will remain subscription-based, with prices at $10 to $15 a month. You can still listen to samples for free, but you’ll only get 30 seconds worth.
The new web-based player sits in a pop-up window and behaves more or less like clients from Last.fm or Pandora.
The web-based client means you can access your music from a wider range of devices — at the very least you can fire it up from any computer.
Christopher Allen, chief operating officer at Napster, tells Reuters:
“with this new platform Napster can easily be integrated into consumer electronics devices or integrated into other Web sites such as social networking sites.”
Is Napster headed for your Facebook page? Certainly sounds like it, though no further details have been announced.
Napster claims around 770,000 subscribers, but lags far behind industry leader iTunes and with Amazon now in the digital downloads game, the market is increasingly crowded.
Napster tries to offer the best of both worlds — allowing streaming audio in the new web-client and subscription-based downloads but clearly most people seem to prefer the iTunes/Amazon buy-single-tracks model.
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Powertune: Gibson’s Self Tuning Guitar
October 3rd, 2007 by iDunzo
Guitar maker Gibson has a history of innovation. The company is responsible for the Humbucker pickup and the legendary Les Paul electric guitar.
Now it is selling the Self Tuning Guitar, which actually has servo motors on the headstock to turn the tuning heads.
The Powertune system, developed over 10 years by German company Tronical, uses a set of piezo-electric pickups to determine the pitch of each string.
These are separate from the regular guitar pickups, which rely on the string vibrating in a magnetic field to cause a current.
The information for the pickups then goes off to the computer brain, which sends its instructions up the strings to the tuning pegs.
The system comes pre-calibrated for concert pitch, but you can tune one string yourself and have the guitar set itself around that.
Best of all, the Powertune can store custom tunings, from alternative open-string tunings for slide guitar to, well, anything you like.
A quick flick of the knob between songs will switch smoothly between them. The rig is an add-on for existing guitars, and will cost $900.00 USD.
And of course, guitar purists are already whining that “real” musicians should be able to tune their own instruments.
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More Cowbell?
October 28th, 2006 by iDunzo
The other day I received an email from a loyal reader which read in part:
Your site is awesome.
It’s just missing – something, and I can’t quite place it.
Oh, I know – it needs more COWBELL!
Well being the nice guy that I am and never wanting to let a reader or good friend down, here’s “more cowbell” for you from the Saturday Night Live comedy sketch that featured guest host Christopher Walken as music producer Bruce Dickinson and Will Ferrell as fictional cowbell player Gene Frenkle:
If the video doesn’t fill your need for more cowbell, then check out the dedicated Wikipedia page or the More Cowbell Project site.
Thanks for your support and keep those emails coming. I love receiving feedback from my readers and friends.
Posted in Humor + Music + Videos | Comments Off on More Cowbell?
Weird Al Yankovic’s latest parody
September 24th, 2006 by iDunzo
Weird Al Yankovic’s latest parody music video “White & Nerdy” has become an instant online classic.
The lyrics include a surprising number of very relevant computer-geek references, including MySpace, Minesweeper, “killer apps,” JavaScript, Segways, ergonomic keyboards, Wikipedia, “ROTFLOL,” and HTML.
As an added bonus, Donny Osmond is a back up dancer for Weird Al.
This video is a lot better then David Hasselhoff’s Jump In My Car for sure 
Posted in Geekery + Humor + Music + Videos | 1 Comment »
